Phase 0: Intake & Context Loading — Detail

Step 0.1: Load the Vault

Read three vault documents in order from the vault root.

A. Rhetoric vault summary — rhetoric-style-summary.md

The constitution. Contains all cataloged patterns across rhetoric dimensions, areas for improvement, speaker-confirmed intent, and per-talk observation log.

Pay special attention to the Speaker-Confirmed Intent section. These are ground-truth design decisions that override any pattern inference. Read the confirmed_intents array in the speaker profile for the structured version.

B. Slide design spec — slide-design-spec.md

Visual design reference: background colors, typography, footer structure, shape census, template layout catalog, and generation rules.

C. Speaker profile — speaker-profile.json

Structured design decisions: presentation modes, rhetoric defaults, confirmed intents, guardrail sources, pacing data, infrastructure, and instrument catalog.

The summary is the rich narrative; the profile is the structured data. When you need nuance, voice examples, or context — read the summary. When you need thresholds, counts, or rules — read the profile.

Freshness check: Compare speaker-profile.json → generated_date against the Last updated line in rhetoric-style-summary.md. If the summary is newer, warn:

"The vault summary was updated {date} but the speaker profile was generated {date}. Run 'update speaker profile' to sync, or proceed with the current profile?"

Step 0.2: Gather User Context

Extract from the conversation what the user has already shared. Common starting points:

• "I need a talk about X for Y conference" — topic and venue known
• "I got accepted to speak at X, help me build the talk" — venue known, topic TBD
• "I want to adapt my [talk name] talk for X" — adaptation scenario
• "Write me a CFP for X conference" — abstract-writing scenario
• "I have this idea about X, could it be a talk?" — exploratory scenario

Step 0.3: Report and Advance

Summarize what you know and what you need.